There’s nothing like the start of a new year to bring on the predictions and make you reflect on the year gone by. Many, many things happened in the social media sphere in 2018, and we’ve picked our favourites and outlined them below.

When asked ‘what were your favourite updates last year?’ our team fairly unanimously mentioned the various Instagram story updates. GIFS, Spotify integration and polls were some of the favourites. Instagram went from strength to strength in 2018, maintaining their position of highest engagement platform. There are roughly one billion active Instagram users, so if you’re not using it in your marketing mix properly, it’s time to make it one of your new year marketing resolutions.

The team’s favourite update to Twitter was the addition of more characters. You now can craft a longer, more meaningful tweet with 280 characters instead of the traditional, limiting 140 characters.

Facebook canvas got a Facelift and a good one at that. Renamed, re-jigged and re-purposed, the addition of Facebook Pixel functionality was a welcome marketing tool – we are 100% on board with Instant Experience Ads.

LinkedIn made a few updates that enhance the user experience – they integrated the LinkedIn Groups app into the main app, added more functions to messaging such as adding the capacity to send documents and they also changed their algorithm to stop favouring the 1% of top users, letting you see more content from your peers.

Pinterest changed up their advertising options in 2018 and now, sponsored videos take up more space within the home feed. Previously, Pinterest only gave the option to show sponsored videos as a ‘pin’, which is roughly less than a third of the size of the new larger sized video ads.

Snapchat… oh, Snapchat. They’re struggling to regain their footing in the fast-paced ever-changing social world. Many of the updates they pioneered were repurposed by Instagram this year and subsequently, Snap stock has lost more than half its value since March 2017. They introduced Snapchat calling and games, and they also introduced filters that work on pets! Maybe 2019 will be their year or perhaps they will keep releasing obscure updates; either way we’ll be watching closely.

As for what’s coming in 2019, only time will tell. What we do know is that we will keep you ‘in the know’ with our monthly Social Media Updates video and blog!